Demo abstract: A research platform for real-world evaluation of routing schemes in delay tolerant social networks
Corey E. Baker, Allen Starke, Shitong Xing, Janise Y. McNair · 2017
Over the past decade, online social networks (OSNs) such as Twitter and Facebook have thrived and experienced rapid growth to over 1 billion users [1]. A major evolution would be to leverage the characteristics of OSNs to evaluate the effectiveness of the many routing schemes developed by the research community in real-world scenarios. In natural disaster situations, Internet and cellular communication infrastructures can be severely disrupted, prohibiting users from notifying family, friends, and associates about safety, location, food, water, and other resources. Disasters typically damage infrastructure, which increases network traffic demands on any available undamaged infrastructure, causing congestion and delays. In this demo, we showcase AlleyOop Social, a secure delay tolerant networking research platform that serves as a real-life mobile social networking application for Apple iOS devices. AlleyOop Social allows users to interact, publish messages, and discover others that share common interests in an intermittent network using Bluetooth, peer-to-peer WiFi, and infrastructure WiFi.